“Oh, Father, we’ve come on an errand of enquiry,” Aramis said. “We wish to know—”
But the priest was looking past them, to the giant Porthos, standing taller than any of the others and looking as if he wished he could shrink his bulk to the church’s proportions. The priest’s glance slid over Porthos, clearly not recognizing him, and looked away, and back at Aramis.
“Any way I can help you, my son,” he said, and continued looking at Aramis as though Aramis were an amazing creature, perhaps an apparition of miraculous nature.
“There was a boy who came,” Aramis said. “No more than a few weeks ago. Looking for information about the lord’s family.”
“Oh,” the priest said, and smiled. “The lord’s grandson. He told me. He said the lord didn’t receive him, which is a pity. Very proud all that family. Very proud.”
Porthos had sidled away from the group to where a tomb stood, carved in rock, displaying, atop its bulk, a knight, crudely carved, lying with his hands joined at the chest. Though the carver who had executed the work displayed no more skill than would have been needed to shape stones for construction, something about the knight—its massive proportions, its huge hands—seemed to speak of a familial relation with Porthos.
D’Artagnan hedged after him, even as Athos and Aramis followed the priest into some back room of the church.
Porthos was running his finger, pensively, around the carved boot of the knight, presumably his ancestor. He looked up to meet D’Artagnan’s gaze, as D’Artagnan approached, and D’Artagnan was surprised to see the grey eyes glisten with tears.
“The priest doesn’t know you,” he said, in a casual tone. “Was he installed after you left?”
Porthos shook his head, and something very much like a small smile twisted his lips. “Oh, no,” he said. “He’s the priest who baptized me, but I daresay he rarely sees my father. He would be more likely to recognize me if he saw him.”
D’Artagnan was sure his features reflected the purest confusion, because Porthos chuckled. “D’Artagnan when I left here I was just seventeen. Oh, I was large, for my age, as I could be. But my body lacked the bulk of muscle it would later acquire. And my features had not yet set, fully, in their adult form. My father looks more as I do now than I looked when I left here.”
D’Artagnan nodded, understanding, but the expression of affliction and confusion threatened to return to Porthos’s face and sometimes it seemed to D’Artagnan he would rather do anything—anything at all—than face a serious Porthos or a Porthos who tried to seriously think through something as difficult as his own feelings. So he said, quickly, “Your father didn’t attend church?”
Porthos shrugged. “Oh, he did and didn’t. He had not been much of a church man after my mother died. I never knew my mother, so I can’t tell you much, but Marie told me that she was a beautiful woman with hair like gold and I . . .” He blushed a little. “In my mind she looks a lot like Athenais. Marie said that she and my father had a child every other year for years, and none of them lived to take the first breath. And then I was born and my mother died. Marie said my mother was tired of giving birth to so many children and didn’t stay to hear whether I was alive, because she couldn’t bear to hear I had died, also. I think . . .” He shrugged. “I think it was rather the size of my head and of my shoulders. The du Vallons kill wives. And mothers. A wonder that Amelie didn’t die of Guillaume.” He frowned. “And perhaps not a mercy.”
And here, he was going again, back to Guillaume, which D’Artagnan guessed was the source of those tears glistening in his eyes, and of that expression of desolation on his features. D’Artagnan opened his mouth, but Porthos lifted a hand. “Leave it be, D’Artagnan, leave it be. It is well enough. Some grief must be felt, sometimes. Else, it damns up inside and bursts out as rage. Look at our friend, Athos.” He shook his head. “I will mourn Guillaume. I will reconcile myself to his death, but . . . D’Artangnan, I wish I could bring him back to du Vallon for burial. Out back there, in the general cemetery there is a small plot, enclosed in a wall. There my ancestors lie. There my mother rests. I would like Guillaume to lie there, under the name du Vallon. I couldn’t give it to him in life, but I think at the end of it all, when we’re ourselves, he deserves to rest under it.” He stopped and swallowed and looked away, at the narrow window on the wall, and at the light shaft that came through it to illuminate a confusion of dancing dust motes.
“Why shouldn’t he?” D’Artagnan asked. “We’ll travel back with you and with the coffin. Surely it can be made ready for travel. Surely. You know that people bring bodies back from war to rest in their homeland.”
“Oh, it’s not that,” Porthos said. “It is my father. He’d never allow it.” He smiled, a brief baring of teeth with no joy at all. “If it comes to that, I’m not sure he’ll allow me to rest there, when my time comes.”
The curate and Aramis emerged from the little room at the back, followed by Athos.
“To be honest, I never understood why the young lord was so excited. And of course, he was the young lord, whatever the old lord might have said. He was one of those young men who had his paternity written on his face. Looked just like his father when I taught him his prayers. But you see, he said his father was dead, and therefore he would surely have inherited when his grandfather died.” He frowned slightly. “Not that several cousins and others, who have been looking to the inheritance as already theirs wouldn’t take it upon themselves to challenge it, but with both parents dead, and the child so clearly young master Pierre’s son, I don’t think anyone could have carried a challenge very far.”
“There are cousins, then?” Aramis asked, all gentle and detached interest. “Who might have an interest in the land? But surely until you got word from the lord’s grandson no one would have thought the lord’s son had died, would they?”
“Well . . .” the little priest shrugged, which seemed more like an all-enveloping movement of too-bony shoulders enclosed in a voluminous black garment. “Ah,” he said. “That. You see, the lord’s son was sent to the capital . . . thirteen years ago, it would be. And for a long time there were no letters, and then, five years ago, a single letter from him to Rouge, as runs the mills. And you see, it’s not natural to be gone that long without sending word.”
“But surely,” Aramis said. “The first letter came after seven years absence. And besides, I understand Lord du Vallon can’t read or write.”
“No he can’t,” the little priest said, and grinned, the happy grin of a small man who nonetheless holds something over a much larger one. “He thinks that reading and writing effeminates you, he says. He says it would turn him into a priest or a cleric and make him less than a man.” He shook his head. “Nor could the younger lord, but yet, I hear it’s not all that difficult to get someone to write a letter for you, in Paris. Nor is it that hard for the lord to get one of his servants to read it. But there hasn’t been word for years and years, save that one letter . . . and who knows if that was even true?” He shrugged again. “The letter, they said, said that the Lord Pierre had left his name and this very successful school of fencing and dancing he’d funded in the capital, and had become a musketeer—” he looked around at them. “As you are, monsieurs. But the truth is, people from St. Guillaume do go to Paris. Not often, it is true, but they do go. And those that went and asked around said there was no du Vallon in the musketeers. And see . . . I think that letter was sent by someone for some purpose I can’t but guess.” His voice climbed, into reed-thin registers, as he said. “They say Paris is all plots and counter-plots and it would drive a man mad to live there and try to understand them. And I say someone wanted us to believe that the Lord Pierre was still alive in Paris. Perhaps one of the lord’s cousins, waiting on the inheritance and hoping that no one would dispute it till then?”
“There are many cousins then?” Athos asked. “And is the domain of du Vallon much disputed?”
The priest shrugged. “There are many cousins. The current lord had five sisters and each of them went off and married a neighboring lord and raised families. And they all want the domain. Oh, not for what it is now, though some of the farms are getting very prosperous indeed. But those farms tend to be on freeholds, and therefore do not pay the lord as they normally would. But the cousins, all of them think that with a little investment and a little attention, and something else than the lord’s unbreakable pride, it would be possible, quite possible, to make Du Vallon a profitable domain. At least profitable for those who don’t want more than a little country place to which they may retire and in which they may live a quite life.”
“And do you know if any of these cousins lives in Paris,” Aramis asked. “Who could have sent the letter?”
“Now, that,” the priest said. “I only have on hearsay, you see, because it’s not in the records of this parish, and I only know what I hear people say, after Mass of a Sunday. But I heard from some people who went to Paris that there’s a cousin of the young lord who lives in Paris and even is in the musketeers. I can’t remember his name, now . . . except it reminded me of something Greek.” He frowned. “Yes. Something Greek. Some great battle. Some pass. Yes, some pass, because for the longest time I’ve thought of the man as Milord Pass.”
“De Termopillae?” Aramis asked, his voice full of disbelief.
“The very one,” the little priest said, now looking at Aramis more than ever as if the young musketeer were a magical apparition, with all the miraculous powers that implied. “The very one. How did you know, lord?”
“Termopillae pass,” Aramis said, and shook his head. “I know de Termopillae. A very well recommended, very well-connected man.”
“That and poorer than a church mouse,” the priest said.
“And church mice are what I know something about.” He grinned, as if he’d made high humor. “You see, his mother married a neighbor lord but it turned out the whole thing was all eaten up from the inside, all in the hands of the moneylenders. And then the man she married killed himself. ” The priest made the sign of the cross, as though to keep away the taint of such an evil event. “And there was nothing left for it but for their son to go and serve in the musketeers. Yes, I would say he would be quite happy to come in for a tidy domain like Du Vallon. And so I shall tell the young Lord Guillaume, when he comes to collect his inheritance. He needs to watch his back every minute and be on his guard all the time, as there are many who would do him in for the sake of his inheritance.”
“I see,” Aramis said, and cast a worried glance towards Porthos and D’Artagnan, who stood by the tomb. “Thank you, Father. You’ve been very informative. We must leave now, but you’ve solved all our problems.”
“Not a bother at all,” the priest said, and smiled again. “I get lonely here, sometimes in the shadows. The children come for their lessons, and the women for their prayers, but I rarely talk to anyone outside the parish. By the time the four of you ride away, there will be people coming in to ask me who the strangers were. I shall be the center of attention for weeks.”
He blessed them all and sent them out of the church to the bright sunlight outside. Blinking, D’Artagnan received his reins from Planchet.
Porthos had already mounted. “We’ll go,” he said. “If we set out now, we’ll make the hostelry by the time it grows dark.”
None of them argued. It wasn’t till they had stopped, to buy some food at an isolated farm house, and sat under a tree to eat a country repast of roast chicken and ham that D’Artagnan said, “This problem grows more charming by the second. There are your cousins—namely de Termopillae, our very own comrade, who might have seen the boy come to you, and who might have traced the boy’s movements, or, who knows, may have been treated to a glimpse of that recording in his pocket. He might have decided that by killing Guillaume and implicating you, he was clearing his way to inheriting Du Vallon. It pains me to think that of a musketeer, but—”
“But de Termopillae isn’t so much a musketeer as a rat in a musketeer’s uniform,” Athos said, and frowned. “You might as well say it, D’Artagnan, as there are a few of them. There are always those with the connections and the knowledge to get a musketeer’s post from the King with no real desserts. Most of those die early, of course, but some are actually careful with their lives. Barring a call to war, de Termopillae might survive to embarrass us all . . .”
“I hope it wasn’t him,” Porthos said. “I would hate to have to kill a fellow musketeer.”
“Indeed,” D’Artagnan said, “but the other prospects are just as charming. There’s your Amelie’s parents—and I have to tell you that I didn’t like the man at all and wouldn’t disdain seeing him swing at the end of a rope.”
Porthos frowned, a dark frown. “No. Nor would I. Honor or not, I still think anyone who turns their daughter out . . .” He shook his head.
“And then,” D’Artagnan said, thinking he’d best not even mention Porthos’s father. “There’s Monsieur de Comeau who was getting money from who knows where.”
“And it might have been Athenais’s husband,” Porthos said. “I know. Though I must say that I consider that far too unlikely. Only because, you see, Monsieur Coquenard would be more likely to want me dead, myself, and it wouldn’t be so hard for some assassin to creep up behind me, some night, when I’m drunk.”
“Except that when you’re drunk we’re all likely to be with you,” Athos said. “And drunk or sober we, the King’s Musketeers, are more than a match for any would-be assassin. ”